Once more with feeling...
Like Stalin, but more stupid
Niall Ferguson
Only a minority of modern dictators have been executed for their crimes. The most bloodthirsty of all, Stalin and Mao, died in full possession of their powers, if not their faculties. Franco pulled off the same trick. Hitler cheated the hangman with a bullet in the bunker. Pol Pot lost power, but was never brought to justice and died in his bed, as did Idi Amin.
Slobodan Milosevic stood trial for his crimes, but died of a heart attack in March with 50 hours of testimony still to be heard. Augusto Pinochet, too, suffered the indignity of arrest; three weeks ago he also expired naturally before prosecution could even begin. Suharto is another fallen dictator who has avoided standing trial on the grounds of ill health. And let's not forget that dwindling band of dictators who are still alive and in power: Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi.
Dictators, by definition, have absolute power. For a dictator to end his life hanging from a rope, or facing a firing squad, therefore requires a rather rare combination of wickedness and stupidity: enough of the former to incur the hatred of his countrymen, enough of the latter to take on armies mightier than his own. Both these qualities Saddam Hussein possessed in abundance. That is why, in the wake of his execution at dawn yesterday morning, he deserves to be remembered as the Mussolini of Mesopotamia — if not the Ceausescu of Baghdad.
These were not, of course, Saddam's intended role models. Even before he came to power, he boasted to KGB agents in Iraq of the admiration he felt for Stalin. And the majority of his crimes were perpetrated in an authentically Stalinist spirit of paranoia and sadism. The atrocity for which Saddam Hussein was hanged — the murder in 1982 of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail — was only one of many murderous acts directed, like so many of Stalin's crimes, against supposedly unreliable ethnic groups.
As Stalin persecuted the Poles and Ukrainians of the Soviet Union, so Saddam hounded the Shias and Kurds of Iraq. Among his worst crimes was the so-called "Anfal" ("Spoils") campaign he launched against the latter in 1988. Thousands died as poison gas and other weapons were deployed against Kurdish towns like Halabja. Even more Kurds and Shias were killed in the wake of their 1991 revolt.
Saddam shared more than a few traits with his hero Stalin. Like Stalin, his origins were humble (he was a shepherd's son from Tikrit). Like Stalin, he was attracted as much to nationalism as to socialism, which made the Ba'ath Party his natural political home. Like Stalin, he had no fear of revolutionary violence; indeed, he was wounded in the leg during an abortive Ba'athist rising in 1959. And, like Stalin, he rose through the party ranks until powerful enough to establish a ruthless dictatorship.
As Deputy President after the 1968 Ba'athist coup, Saddam brought to Iraq an authentically Stalinist combination of modernisation and repression. Under his direction, revenues from the newly nationalised oil industry were poured into education and infrastructure. At the same time, however, he tightened his grip on both party and army. Having forced his way to the presidency in July 1979, he gathered together the leading members of the Ba'ath Party and read out the names of 68 people he suspected of disloyalty. Each was immediately arrested. After being tried for treason, in true Stalinist fashion, 22 of them were executed. A pattern of exemplary terror was soon established that owed as much to The Godfather as to "Koba the Dread" (Stalin's nickname). One minister who ventured to criticise Saddam was literally diced up and presented to his own widow.
The People's Army — the military wing of the Ba'ath Party — and the Mukhabarat (Department of Intelligence) were his chosen instruments for terrorising real and imagined opponents. The facade of legitimacy was provided by a classic personality cult. The gargantuan statues, the garish murals, the bombastic propaganda: all were taken from the 1930s Soviet playbook.
Yet Stalin would never have been as stupid as Saddam was — to pit his own army not once but twice against the most powerful military in the world.
The first mistake was perhaps understandable. Between 1980 and 1988, Saddam had tried and failed to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. Weighed down by war debts, he turned his eye to neighbouring Kuwait. The United States was at best equivocal in its support of the Kuwaitis in the months before Saddam's invasion; indeed, President George H W Bush seemed to Margaret Thatcher to be "going wobbly" even after Iraqi troops had crossed the border. Yet Saddam had fatally miscalculated. The collapse of Soviet power after the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he could no longer play one superpower off against the other. Facing a clear-cut ultimatum from the UN Security Council, Saddam should have backed down. Instead he fought — and was thrashed.
Saddam's second and ultimately fatal blunder was downright stupid. In George W Bush he faced an antagonist very different in temper from the elder President Bush; a leader persuaded by his advisers that Saddam's overthrow was desirable in three ways: as retaliation for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (though Iraqi complicity was conspicuous by its absence); as pre-emption before Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction (though the evidence for their existence was woefully thin); and as proof of the superiority of democracy over dictatorship (though history offered no evidence that democracy could be imposed at gunpoint in the Middle East). Saddam had been Bush-whacked once; to suffer the same fate twice was worse than carelessness. Rather than confess that his WMD programmes had been abandoned in the 1990s, he continued to bluff, apparently ruling out the possibility that Bush Jnr was hell-bent on invading Iraq, with or without UN backing.
Today, of course, we can look back and understand Saddam's miscalculation better. In Saddam's eyes, as in the eyes of Bush Snr, the lesson of history was that the alternative to Saddam was civil war, not democracy. The US had stopped short of regime change in 1991 and had cynically left the Shias and Kurds to face Saddam's wrath, having initially urged them to rise up in revolt. All that has happened since 2003 has vindicated those who argued that, without Saddam's iron fist, Iraq would disintegrate, not democratise. The dictator's nemesis proved to be a president so naive that he did not even know the difference between Sunni and Shia.
The decline and fall of Saddam Hussein has been too tawdry to pass muster as a Shakespearian tragedy. Its protagonist was too crass a character, more Don Corleone than Coriolanus. This play has been part Marlowe, part Brecht: a cross between The Massacre at Paris and The Threepenny Opera. Like the Duc de Guise in Marlowe's bloodthirsty drama, Saddam was responsible for more than enough mass murder to justify his own violent end. Unlike Macheath in Brecht's musical, Saddam was not pardoned in the last minute before his execution, but his death seems to pose a version of Brecht's old question: "Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?"
In the same spirit, we may ask ourselves who is the bigger criminal: he who tyrannises a people, or he who first bankrolls the tyrant — and then replaces his tyranny with anarchy?
For Saddam's career would have taken a very different course had he not, at vital times, received support as well as opposition from the United States. He was given training by the CIA in Egypt following the abortive coup of 1959. Though Iraq appeared to be drifting into the Soviet orbit in the early 1970s, Saddam won favour in Washington for purging the Iraqi Communists. After 1979, he received copious quantities of arms and aid to prosecute his war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.
President Bush yesterday described Saddam's execution as "an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror". Another way of regarding it is as just the latest of tens of thousands of acts of vengeance perpetrated by Iraqis against other Iraqis since the American invasion.
The dictator is dead, hoist by the petard of his own Stalinist cruelty and Mussolini-like miscalculation. But Iraq's road towards democratic stability has a very long way still to run. If every milestone is an execution, it will be a hellish highway indeed.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org
